The Thrash Hits Staff Albums of 2014

By now you’ve read the one list that really matters – the Thrash Hits Top 10 Albums of 2014 – but now we’re giving you the opportunity to delve a little deeper into the minds that created it. Here are the unedited, unspoiled and unsullied opinions that we crunched together to distill our Top 10. We asked our contributors to tell us what their personal Top 10 records of the last 12 months were, and to justify their top choice to us.

This is how you do a second album. It takes everything that was great about The Killing Jar and adds to it, and shrugs off the minor quibbles that first album had. It has more personality than every boring hype record I’ve been forced to listen to this year. I’ve listened to this record more than most other things put together. It’s fucking marvellous.

It’s a testament to Joyce Manor’s craft that they’re able to smuggle saccharine 80s synths into one song, write another that sounds remarkably like The Smiths or The Cure – and still bottle the punk rock zeitgeist better than anyone in 2014 without sounding like they’re even trying.

Sun Kil Moon – Benji
Tigers Jaw – Charmer
Moose Blood – I’ll Keep You In Mind, From Time To Time
Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) – You Will Eventually Be Forgotten
Jamie T – Carry On The Grudge
Gnarwolves – Gnarwolves
The #1s – The Number Ones
The Lawrence Arms – Metropole
Cymbals Eat Guitars – Lose

One of those listening experiences I feel compelled to start again as soon as it’s finished, The Cavern captured my heart on the first listen. There’s so many highlights across the 45 minute one track opus, from winding riffs, through stomping doom to virtuosic solos, my highlight being the point at which Windhand’s Dorothia Cottrell steps in for arguably the song’s most epic moment. It’s my album of the year because I cant stop playing it and will be forever enlightened by the incredible journey it takes me on.

Foundations of Burden is a record that speaks to the masses – it’s emotional, powerful, heavy and at its core there is a spark of hope that lifts the record out of the darkness and into the light. Wallowing in your own misery is fine, but there is a way out and Pallbearer are finding it.

Without being Every Time I Die’s best record to date, From Parts Unknown still has huge moments for me. At first I thought it was too heavy, but then I realised I was just hungover. When I settled in to it, I saw it’s greatness. Even found myself loving that track with whats-his-face from The Gaslight Anthem. The heaviest parts are crushing and enough to make me want to flip a shark through a table. I back it. It may not be my favourite ETID record, or even have a lot on it that I want to hear played live, but it is still my record of the year and the songs I do want to hear live off of it, are dangerously daft.

They may be classed as indie rock these days, but whatever label you stick on PBTT, Keep You is undeniably magnificent – a shimmering, twinkling masterpiece of melancholy. Lock the door, turn out the lights and immerse yourself. They beat Taylor Swift to my number one – shit doesn’t HAPPEN.

Mikael Akerfeldt may not have considered your feelings with the release of Pale Communion, but I imagine he doesn’t care. Any trappings of Opeth’s earlier life have now fallen away. Gone are the gnawing, downtuned riffs and Akerfeldt’s rasping growl, to be replaced by complex arrangements and melodies so sharp they’ll take your wagging finger off.

While the obvious influence of early AFI and Alkaline Trio is present throughout the goth-punk that makes up Creeper’s debut, they have dragged it into the 21st century, with a very British spin. Full of raw punk energy, huge melodies and a sense of dark theatrics, it’s exciting and enigmatic.

Pete Long, who “doesn’t get Twitter” – follow him on Twitter here: @PeatLong

At the Gates – At War with Reality

Slaughter of the Soul grabbed the world’s attention, but the earlier albums grabbed me. There was a raw, desperate melancholy, a twisted world view and sense of melody that I just loved. So a new album channeling that through everything they’d learned was exactly what I wanted from them.

Rob McAuslan, former death metal superstar and now island hermit – follow him on Twitter here: @robmcauslan

Pallbearer – Foundations of Burden

Now THIS is how you follow up a strong yet flawed debut. Pallbearer mashed 80s goth-pop, prog and radio rock influences into their already potent doom to make one of the few records I haven’t tired of hearing in 2014. Essential listening in an otherwise fairly lean year.